By far the oldest candidate in the race at 75, Ron Paul is suddenly a top contender. He has a lot of younger supporters, mostly because he favors legalizing pot,
and adopts the sort of extreme intellectual positions that have also drawn college age kids to "pure"
philosophies like Communism and Ayn Rand's Positivism for generations. You know, "clean" uncompromising positions that get rid of all those messy human feelings and complexities.

Ron Paul loves to brag about being a straight-talker who doesn't change his positions. He says he would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act (on property rights grounds, not to defend racism natch.)
He wants to legalize all drugs, including heroin, withdraw all US troops from other countries immediately, end government flood control efforts and return to the gold standard.

And speaking as someone who has been researching candidate scandals for many years now, he's pretty darn squeaky clean. Sorry to disappoint you haters, but (like Obama) Ron Paul
shows no sign of screwing around on his wife (unlike Newt or Bill Clinton), or doing favors for special interests who then put money in his pocket (unlike Newt or Rick Santorum).
That's admirable. He's also one of the few politicians who did not evade the draft (unlike Gingrich and Romney. Santorum and Obama were too young to be drafted, and did not volunteer.)

But Congressman Paul does has a paranoid, fringey side that he does NOT like to admit. Paul has written and spoken a lot about hidden conspiracies of bankers, diplomats, the Trilateral Commission, secret
plans to merge the US with Mexico and Canada, etc. (He calls it the North American Union.) If that sounds like the kind of stuff that John Birchers and right-wing militia racists say, well, he's very popular in that crowd too. (Read the Stormfront and other
neo-Nazi websites if you dare, and you'll see.)

Ever since he began running for Congress again in 1996, Ron Paul has tried to downplay or deny responsibility for some incredibly racist newsletters he sold to that conspiracy crowd.
But it's hard for him
to deny responsibility for a publication called "The Ron Paul Survival Report", edited by Ron Paul, when it says stuff like "When I was in Congress....." He had no problem cashing the checks certainly.
And if it wasn't paranoid militia conspiracy, why was it called the Survival Report?

The sad truth is that Ron Paul is a consummate politician. He's just better at tailoring his message to his different audiences than, say, Mitt Romney, whose adjustments are
painfully obvious. Ron Paul
is the cool grandpa pothead to college kids, the prophet of racial fear to neo-Nazis, an opponent of public schools to Christian home-schoolers, and a crusader against the coming One World
Government to the anti-flouride conspiracy crowd. And each group thinks he's their own, special warrior.

Quotes

"I think it's a theory, the theory of evolution and I don't accept it as a theory." - Ron Paul, CBS-TV, 2007

"illegal immigrants enter the country for the
express purpose of giving birth. But illegal immigrants also use emergency rooms, public roads, and public schools. In many cases they are able to
obtain Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, and even unemployment benefits. ... We must end the
perverse incentives that encourage immigrants to come here illegally, including the anchor baby incentive." - Ron Paul, (on his congressional website,
not the infamous newsletters)

"You know, the greatest hoax I think that has been around in many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming.
You notice they don't call it global warming anymore. It's weather control." - Ron Paul, on Fox

"The public school now is a propaganda machine. They start with our kids even in kindergarten, teaching them about family values, sexual education, gun rights,
environmentalism, and they condition them to believe in so much that is totally un-American.” - Ron Paul, to Christian home-schoolers, March 2011

"The ultimate goal is not simply a superhighway, but an integrated North American Union--complete with a currency, a cross-national bureaucracy, and virtually
borderless travel within the Union. Like the European Union, a North American Union would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty
altogether." - Ron Paul, 2006 (on his congressional website, not the infamous newsletters)

"Critics of NAFTA and CAFTA warned at the time that the agreements were actually a move toward ... an eventual
merging of North America into a border-free area. Proponents of these agreements dismissed this as preposterous and conspiratorial. Now we see that the
criticisms appear to be justified." - Ron Paul, 2006 (on his congressional website, not the infamous newsletters)

"This new [UN Peackeeping] commission will create the beginning of a global UN army. It will claim the right to intervene in any conflict anywhere on the globe,
bringing the World Bank and the IMF formally into the picture as well. It is a complete new world order..." Ron Paul, 2006 (on his congressional website, not the infamous newsletters)

Starting in 1984, Ron Paul published a series of related newsletters, called the Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul Freedom Report, Ron Paul Survival
Report, etc. He had over 100,000
subscribers at one point and is said to have made over a million dollars a year. (Subscriptions cost $100 a year for a magazine usually 8 pages long.)

Over nearly 20 years, the newsletters published a bunch of hateful and inflammatory racist, anti-gay and conspiratorial columns. You can read 50
of the originals on this website. Warning -- it's pretty raw stuff.

One article said Martin Luther King Jr. “seduced underage girls and boys” and “replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced
integration.” Another offers this
strategy against "urban youth":

"If you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot,
of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example).”

Speaking of AIDS, one article said homosexuals
“enjoy the attention and
pity that comes with being sick,” and another said “I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the
rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.” -- A June, 1990 article

In 2001, as Paul moved to the mainstream and rejoined the Republican party, he disavowed these comments and blamed them on an unnamed ghostwriter. He said he
didn't know about them until ten
years later -- a statement easily proved false -- and that he had lied in 1996 when he didn't say he didn't write them.

You see, when Paul ran for Congress in 1996, as a Libertarian, his opponent brought
these newsletters up to show that Paul had fringe ideas. At that time, they were still being published, and Paul didn't deny writing them. He said that the inflammatory quotes his opponent gave were taken out of context, and that his commentaries about blacks came in the context of "current events and
statistical reports of the time." (You can check the context of the inflammatory quotes yourself on the link above, but they look pretty representative to me.)

In fact, Dr. Paul defended some of these racist statements in an interview with the
Dallas Morning News in 1996. One newsletter said that young Black men are "unbelievably fleet of foot." Dr. Paul confirmed this opinion by telling the newspaper "If you try to
catch someone that has stolen a purse from you,
there is no chance to catch them." Another article in the newsletter (from 1992, just 4 years before this controversy first erupted) said:

"Given the inefficiencies of
what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely
criminal."

When the Dallas reporter asked Ron Paul about that quote, he said "These aren't my figures. That is the assumption you can gather from" the report.

Paul and his supporters claim that
he moved to Texas, the newsletters stayed in Washington, and he was too busy to even look at the 8 page newsletter that earned him a million dollars a years.
(So much for
Texas straight talk.) We have direct evidence that he's lying. Renae Hathaway, Paul's former secretary who still supports him, says that Paul was a very
hands-on owner of the newsletters: "He always got to see the final product. He would proof it." (Another longtimeemployee, Eric Rittberg, confirms that
he saw Ron Paul proofing, editing and signing off on the newsletters.) Hathaway said the newsletter company had an office in Houston
and another one in Clute, very near Paul's house, and that he came to Houston -- 50 miles from his home -- at least weekly.

Ed Crane, the longtime head of the Cato Institute, recalls
meeting Paul in the 1980s and discussing mail solicitation lists for the newsletters. Paul agreed that “people who have extreme views” responded best,
and said he got his best response from the mailing list for the conspiratorial, anti-Semitic newspaper
"The Spotlight." Rittberg says that Paul put the racist material
in the newsletters simply to make money -- "the real big money came from some of that racially tinged stuff -- and it seems to have worked very well.

The President manages
millions of people. Even if
you take Ron Paul at his word, he couldn't manage a staff of 10 without them suddenly printing extreme racist progaganda FOR TEN YEARS. I just don't believe him, but if you do,
he's a piss-poor manager. More likely he happily trafficked in the racist material to make money. And it worked. In 1984, Paul reported dept of up to $765,000; by 1995,
most of the debt was gone and his net worth was up to $3.3 million. The question remains, does he believe any of this stuff himself?

The thing is, Ron Paul has published a lot of similar (but milder) material since then, and much of it is still on his congressional website, under his name. (Read any of
his "Texas Straight Talk" columns
from 2005 or 2006, and you'll see what I mean.) He rails against "anchor babies," warns of
conspiracies to impose a "North American United Nations," complains about secret cartels of international bankers -- all big parts of the racist right-wing's world-view. (See quotes, above.)
So far he hasn't claimed that someone else wrote these "Texas Straight Talk" columns, but I haven't seen any reporters ask him about them, either.

But there's plenty more. Ron Paul defenders claim Martin Luther King Jr. is a hero of his, but Paul
voted against the Martin Luther King Day holiday -- both
times - and it fell 5 votes short the first time. (It passed the
second time despite his opposition.)

He said
on MSNBC that the Civil War was not necessary, and gave a rave review to a pro-Confederacy revisionist book called "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" by Thomas E. Woods.
Ron Paul said Wood's book "heroically rescues real history from the politically correct memory hole.” Woods, who founded the secessionist group "League of the South," and Ron Paul both
teach at the Ludwig Van Mises Institute in Alabama, which was founded by Lew Rockwell -- Ron Paul's former chief of staff. In fact, many Paul supporters claim Lew Rockwell wrote the
racist newsletter columns under Ron Paul's name, but Rockwell denies that.

The fact is, Ron Paul has said a lot of things similar to (but milder than) the shocking newsletter quotes, things he does not dispute. In 2007, Dr. Paul republished
his 1987 book "Freedom Under Siege" which has a lot
of choice passages,
such as calling the AIDS sufferer "a victim of his own lifestyle [who] victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care"; saying sexual harassment
victims bear some responsibility because they didn't quit their jobs; and complaining that whites would be called bigots if they formed a white caucus in Congress,
but minority caucuses are OK.

Ron Paul is firmly enmeshed in the right-wing, conspiracy subculture. He has appeared on the Alex Jones radio show 40 times over 12 years, and given extensive interviews to the John Birch Society
newsletter. So whether or not he wrote any one particularly nasty racist sentence of a given issue, he is behind all of it. He has been living in that world for years, building connections with the people in it, spreading
its ideas, and making money off of doing so. It's cowardly of him to deny it all now.